by Richard Peck
“It sounds quite exciting, miss.”
“Does it? I suppose so. But pointless if I am to marry Gregory Forrest, which is the current plot afoot. There’s no point in dancing with every spotty youth in London if one is to marry an American from New York. One feels quite trapped.” She sighed. “And marriage is the worst trap of all. Though perhaps a safe harbor, if something can be both a trap and a harbor. You must see me through, Miranda. I’m feeling rather hopeless now. But mark me! I’ve been known to spoil other people’s meddling plans. You aren’t thinking of marrying, are you?”
“Oh no, miss.” But then Mary remembered the Wisewoman’s strange words, and she colored. But a rattling, uncertain knock interrupted her thoughts.
“I cannot bear it!” Amanda twitched with temper. “Yes! Who is it?”
It was either Hilda or Hannah looming in the doorway. They were sisters and just alike. “Oh, Miss Amanda, if you please, I was sent to fetch the new one—”
“She’s called Miranda!” Amanda shouted.
“If you say so, miss.”
“I do say so!”
“Yes, miss.” Hilda—it was Hilda—wiped her nose nervously with the end of her apron. “She’s to come help at table. They’s as busy as bees in bottles down there and Mr. Finley says—”
“Ah, Finley. Then I suppose you must go,” Amanda said to Miranda. “I shall send Miranda along shortly, Hannah.”
Hilda sniffed and vanished. Mary adjusted her cap and rose to go. As she lifted the tray from the bed, Amanda’s hand grasped her wrist. Lightly, but Mary could feel fingernails imprinting her flesh. “As you serve in the dining room tonight, Miranda, look sharp and notice the young American gentleman. Then tomorrow you can tell me what you think of him. You’ll notice him. He’s quite divinely handsome and better behaved than the rest. He is the man my mother has decided I should marry.”
Mary could only wonder why her young mistress wasn’t downstairs dining grandly beside her fiancé.
“But I am a rebel. When I’m deprived of satisfaction, I can usually withhold it from others. Poor Gregory will have to do without me. It will make my mother wild. No, don’t worry. I shan’t sulk in my bed forever. I’ll think of a plan to foil them all.”
“But, miss—”
“I know. You wonder why I don’t obey my family and make a suitable marriage”—Mary hadn’t been nearly bold enough to wonder that—“and I will tell you. I love someone else. Quite hopeless, and quite madly. And if my mother knew who he was, she would in her serene and gracious manner have me flogged.”
2
John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Lady Eleanor Whitwell hung at the far end of the double drawing room. Lady Eleanor in court dress—cascading skirts of ivory petals, feathers crowning her hair—at Buckingham Palace in the last year of Queen Victoria’s reign. She’d been forty when Sargent completed his work. Now, at fifty-one, she could have sat for the portrait again, her beauty unchanged.
Late summer was the Isle of Wight’s only social season, when London society came for the regatta at Cowes. Lady Eleanor stood that long September evening beneath the portrait of herself, entertaining her houseguests and being only a little entertained by them. The gentlemen had returned from Cowes, and so the room was balanced between the blackness of their dinner clothes and the colors of the ladies’ gowns.
It had been very different in the previous summer, 1910. Then ladies and gentlemen alike had worn black to mourn the passing of King Edward after his short reign. Now the pall had lifted, and the aristocracy had returned to their pursuit of pleasure.
Lady Eleanor looked across the sea of chattering guests to Gregory Forrest’s tall, immaculate figure. He stood patiently, listening to the tedious monologue of her husband, Sir Timothy. She stared at the unlined, open face and the visionary eyes that were pure American. She’d courted this young man on Amanda’s behalf in a manner that had raised an occasional eyebrow. But Lady Eleanor, the third daughter of an impoverished duke, was faithful to a fault to the monotonous old Sir Timothy, a tea merchant fifteen years her senior. It was plain what she was about with this handsome American, for he was rich. He was the only son of a beer baron, a German immigrant who had settled in Brooklyn and changed the family name from Wald to Forrest, in celebration of his new citizenship.
People murmured about the mingling of Forrest beer and Whitwell tea. There was even a line or two of bad verse repeated just out of Lady Eleanor’s hearing:
And malt does more than background can
To justify Amanda’s man.
Lady Eleanor had set Amanda’s cap for Gregory Forrest, and headstrong Amanda had seemed to go along with the plan, at least for a time. She’d been only seventeen then and just out of the schoolroom, if it could be said she’d ever been schooled. Her formal introduction to society had still lain a year or two away. And Amanda’s beauty already promised much.
Sir Timothy had brought Gregory Forrest home from his London club. They were an unlikely pairing. Sir Timothy, almost deaf, had never been able to converse on any subject but the tea-importing business. Gregory Forrest had listened with the patience of a parish priest while his eye roved and came to rest upon Amanda.
More than his wealth influenced Lady Eleanor. She saw strength in the set of the American’s shoulders and determination in his apparently dreamy eyes. She hoped he might exercise a necessary control over Amanda that she as a mother could never manage. There was a dark side to her daughter. The wildest heights of childish merriment could turn to the grimmest sulks. Amanda’s rebellion, now playful, might blossom—and soon—into the bright flower of disgrace. Amanda’s mother understood her far better than Amanda knew.
The dinner gong sounded at last, striking a brassy note across Lady Eleanor’s thoughts. At the far end of the room, Sir Timothy clapped a vague hand on his prospective son-in-law’s back and went looking for the lady he was to take in to dinner, a Mrs. Glaslough. And Lady Eleanor was claimed by her dinner partner, a Mr. Harry Emerson, whose alliance with Mrs. Glaslough was often noted in the more disreputable newspapers. Lady Eleanor took Mr. Emerson’s arm and led the way to the dining room.
* * *
It was an evening’s work for Gregory Forrest to concentrate on his dinner partner’s conversation. Miss Ward-Benedict, Amanda’s special friend, had a great many teeth and a great many pearls, and her hands were covered with antiquated rings. But there was no wedding band among them. She’d long since navigated the choppy seas of an extended mating season—London, Dublin, India—and had reached the far shore unclaimed. She was in every sense a miss.
Gregory was happy enough not to be paired with the notorious Mrs. Glaslough, though her beauty had stood the test of time. But when she spoke, even in an undertone, she was audible four chairs away. And her laughter reminded him of the sparks that sent the new wireless radio messages from ship to ship across the empty sea.
Like anybody with one foot planted in a foreign culture, Gregory Forrest was startled by the folkways. The openness with which illicit romance was treated in England would knock crude New York sideways. Apparently this Mrs. Glaslough and the man on Lady Eleanor’s right were always given adjoining rooms when they visited country houses. They passed the days ignoring one another and the nights in one another’s arms. It wasn’t quite the England of Gregory Forrest’s schoolbook history or the Harvard course in British literature.
But his basically romantic soul was ignited by the pageantry here. Every figure around this sumptuous table seemed to fit effortlessly into the pattern. The drooping mustaches above the towering winged collars. The ropes of inherited diamonds and opals adorning softly rounded or pigeon-ponderous breasts. The heads nodding to conversation that moved cleverly to the brink of scandal, then retreated knowingly.
It was all a good deal for a brewer’s son to absorb. Gregory’s mind retreated to the house where he’d spent his boyhood. To Bushwick in Brooklyn, where the German brewery owners’ turreted mansions backed upon their own f
oremen’s wooden row houses. Bushwick, where even the well water seemed to taste of hops. And he remembered his father, who worked beside his laborers in boots and overalls. A brewer born, who could read no English, little German, but every figure in a financial statement.
The most familiar scenes of Gregory Forrest’s life glowed suddenly bright, and the most painful memory struck like lightning in his mind. To remember Brooklyn was to remember his best friend, Sammy Bettendorf, the son of a junk-wagon driver.
Greg shared all his secrets with Sammy, and they plotted new lives as Kansas cowboys. Sammy, who lived with his stout parents and four sisters at the top of a frame row house on Goodwin Street.
It was a muggy summer’s night in the year Greg turned nine, and his dreams had been only dimly disturbed by the fire engine’s bells. In the morning he’d awakened to find his mother sitting on the edge of his bed, her wrapper pulled tight around her. “There vas trouble last night, Greg.” She ran her hand through his tousled dark hair. “Bad trouble, my boy, down Goodvin Street.”
“Sammy?” Greg asked. “Trouble at the Bettendorfs’?”
She nodded and the tears welled in her eyes. “A fire. It vas very bad. The engines could do nothing.” His mother looked at him, trying to tell him with her eyes.
“But Sammy?”
“Sammy and all his family are gone.”
“Gone? Dead?” Greg asked at last. “All of them?”
“Ja. All. . . .”
Years later and three thousand miles away, Gregory Forrest’s memory probed that moment again and found the wound unhealed. But it brought back other memories of his mother, of her storytelling that had fueled his earliest dreams. Tales of black forests full of helpless widows and useful elves and bright treasures guarded by ogres. And always in the woodland clearing a beautiful maiden whose blond braids coiled around a ravishing face. A chaste, blond, milk-fed beauty awaiting a hero’s liberating kiss. Now Gregory Forrest had found quite another old-world maiden. And long after he’d put such boyish romancing behind him.
Foreseeing the family’s first gentleman, his father had sent Gregory away to boarding school, then to college where the Arrow-collared sons of older money drank whiskey, not beer. But the old man hadn’t reckoned with the intellect that took Gregory to law school, where he finished first in the class of 1909. Or the growing desire for creativity, which drew his son’s mind beyond courtrooms—the need to create a life not merely for himself but for the immigrants still pouring into New York.
Gregory Forrest began to dream of houses. Houses to replace the city’s terrible tenements where in winter families slept in the warmth of crowded bodies.
When Gregory gave up a place in a Wall Street law firm and announced his intention to study architecture, the old brewer could only shake his head in wonder. But if it was to be housebuilding instead of law, then so be it. After a brief look at the bold beauties of Fifth Avenue society and the tennis-playing sisters of his Harvard classmates, he set out on a grand tour of Europe to examine the architectural triumphs so lacking in New York. The tour was meant only to begin with London. But it had ended there on the day he first saw Sir Timothy’s Amanda poised on the sofa in the Whitwells’ darkly paneled London drawing room in Charles Street.
He’d fallen in love with her beauty: her black hair still drawn back like a schoolgirl’s, her cool violet gaze—in love with everything about her. Even the disturbing sense that she might bolt at any moment, leaving him in the world alone.
Gregory Forrest worked steadily toward the moment when Amanda would stop calling him “Father’s friend.” But she knew how to dangle herself before him, and then draw back. He experienced the torture of a young man overwhelmed by his own capacity to suffer. He dreamed of making her his wife. Of going back to New York with her. Of rebuilding the sprawling, sordid city: he to plan and carry out, she to inspire and encourage.
When Lady Eleanor reminded him with exquisite tact of Amanda’s youth, he contented himself with a more measured courtship. He courted her and her mother and father. He’d have willingly courted all Charles Street and London and the Isle of Wight.
He slipped over to the Continent occasionally, to stir himself with its architectural glories. But he learned that it was easier to be in the same country as Amanda, even when they were separated by geography or her moods. He enrolled himself in a London school of architecture and managed to get through whole days in the pursuit of a subject less elusive than Amanda.
When he grew bold and embraced her almost roughly, she only laughed. When he was driven into frustrated hopelessness, she grew absentmindedly tender. It took very little to win him back, and Amanda enjoyed the work, though it was only a game to her.
There’d been that August day when Gregory’s face had darkened with an anger that warned even Amanda. “Damn it, Amanda, stop playing games. If you want to be a child, go back to your nanny, or whatever she’s called. You want all the freedom of a woman and all the protection of a child.”
“I was never a child, not really,” Amanda said. “That’s just the point. While you were roaming the American prairie, having had your independence declared for you, I was a prisoner in the nursery. I was scheming at an age when you were thinking—whatever little boys think about.”
“And what was the point of all that scheming?”
“Well, it didn’t get me very far, I’m bound to admit. But—oh, don’t you see? Doesn’t anyone?” Amanda shifted on the long drawing-room sofa where they sat. She drew her legs up, then settled quite companionably with her back resting against Gregory’s shoulder. A wisp of her hair swept his cheek, and he knew that whatever this argument was about, he would lose it.
“I want the freedom you men take for granted. But I doubt I’d find that even in the Land of the Free, as you Americans so arrogantly call it. I want to make my own decisions. This is the twentieth century. Yet women are still meant to be decorative by day and compliant by night, while men have cornered the market on freedom of choice.”
“Choose me and you’ll have exercised all the rights of the New Woman,” Gregory said, yearning to draw her into his arms.
“Don’t talk down to me, Gregory. What if I have chosen someone else already? Has the thought crossed your mind?”
“Has it crossed yours?”
“What pomposity! Perhaps it has.”
“Then I doubt that you’d be crying for your freedom.”
“Matters are not that cut-and-dried.” Then Amanda surprised him by turning to say, “Give me your hand.”
He held out his hand and she gripped it in her small fist, rubbing her thumb across it from wrist to fingertip.
“Are you going to read my palm?” he asked, trying to coax her out of this fiery mood.
“I don’t need a fortune-teller’s powers to see you haven’t worked a day in your life.”
“Neither have you.”
“That’s not the point. Behind all your vigorous American idealism, you’re as idle as all the men I’ve ever known. Almost all of them.”
“What makes you think I’m an idealist?”
“Heavens! You positively reek of idealism. You have some master plan about reforming the world that you mean to spring on me when I’ve finally given way to your charms and am fainting with love in your arms. It’s true, isn’t it? I’m never wrong.”
If Gregory Forrest hadn’t been in love with Amanda Whitwell before, that moment would have turned the tide. This self-centered, icily remote girl had seen through him.
“It’s true. There’s something I want very much to do—apart from marrying you, Amanda.”
“Well, go on. I’m longing to hear what it is.”
He told her. Amanda fidgeted, but seemed to hear him out. He told her of the New York teeming with immigrants, of the eternally dark streets, of water unfit to drink, of epidemics that raged from room to crowded room. He nearly told her how the best friend of his boyhood had died in a tinderbox bedroom. He drew back at the last moment,
unwilling to relive it himself.
But he told her the dream that was growing in him: to build solid, safe houses with lawns and plumbing and electricity. Streets—neighborhoods of them, free of filth and disease and despair. Free of the shoddy materials that invited death by the fire that came in the night.
Amanda listened—unwillingly. She wasn’t shocked by the sufferings of faceless immigrants. She was more disturbed by Gregory Forrest’s idealistic plans to give them a better life. He spoke of these people as his fellow citizens. He saw no distance between them and himself. He seemed to view his future as part of theirs. And he meant it.
It surpassed idealism, and left her behind. She could never rule Gregory Forrest, not on her terms. He had a ruling passion already. In the hour that Gregory was falling more deeply in love with her, touched by the silence in which she heard him out, Amanda added one more reason to resist him. It would have been kind to say to him at that moment: You need another sort of woman. Go find her. But Amanda was not kind, and without a suitable suitor, she’d be left at the mercy of her mother’s plans. It could lead to a showdown that would reveal Amanda’s darkest secret.
And so, against the backdrop of Gregory’s words, Amanda thought intently about John Thorne. She released Gregory’s hand and recalled the calloused roughness of John Thorne’s workman’s hands gripping her arms. John Thorne, who by possessing her had become her possession. And a taunt to the powers that had kept her a pampered prisoner. She thought long and hard about John Thorne, and reminded herself that in a game this dangerous, rules were made to be broken.
* * *
Gregory Forrest continued to endure Amanda’s whims. But on that evening when he sat through the endless dinner without her, he was close to giving up. Amanda spent more and more time in her room, mildly indisposed. Gregory knew not to worry about her health. His worries were all centered on their future. He clenched his square hands beneath the table and longed, just for a moment, for the kind of woman he could bend to his will. But in arrogance he was no match for Amanda, and he knew it.